A Review of Who the Hell Are We Fighting? The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars

One Intelligence Analyst Remembers Another

“Adams' story raises questions about the relationship between intelligence and policy that persist to this day.”

The Sam Adams of C. Michael Hiam’s book is neither the hero of the
American Revolution nor the beer, but Samuel A. Adams (1933–88), who in his
10-year career as a CIA analyst caused more trouble than any analyst before or
since. Sam, a distant relative of his 18th-century namesake, arrived at the
Agency in 1963 after a brief spell as a “downwardly mobile WASP” (his term) in
the outside world. By his own account, Sam’s bosses were calling him “the outstanding analyst” in the Agency after he had been there only three years.[1]

In another three years, they were badgering him to resign. His story
raises important questions about the relationship between intelligence and
policy that persist to this day.

Sam was good-looking, brilliant,
endlessly curious and inventive, and a glutton for research. He had a
wonderfully self-deprecating sense of humor. He was almost childlike in his
eagerness to discover things and share his discoveries with everyone around
him. He was also obsessive, stubborn, quixotic, and disheveled to the point of
slovenliness. He was incapable of marching to any drummer but his own. Thomas
Powers, who edited both Hiam’s book and Sam’s own memoir (and who wrote The
Man Who Kept the Secrets, the standard biography of CIA director Richard
Helms), describes Sam this way:

I never knew a man with such an enormous
appetite for sheer information. I remember him reading the multiple volumes of
the British official intelligence history of WW II — a massive series of tomes
which were just pure information, one damn case after another. Sam loved them.[2]

Sam’s
first assignment when he arrived at CIA was the Congo, and this is
where I got to know him. (I have a cameo role at the beginning of
Hiam’s book as the nerdy South Africa analyst at the next desk.)
Sub-Saharan Africa was on the front burner in the early 60s, and no
part of the continent was getting more attention than the Congo, which
seemed to be tearing itself apart and/or going communist. At that
moment, not many issues loomed larger for this country than saving the
Congolese from themselves and the Soviets.

Starting with little beyond what he
might have gleaned from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Sam read everything
he could find, talked with anyone who would sit still for him, and filled box
after box with three-by-five cards. His phenomenal memory gave him almost total
recall, and he quickly became one of Washington’s reigning authorities on the Congo.

Sam’s specialty was the “Simba”
rebels in the eastern Congo. How much of a threat did they pose to the
extraordinarily weak central government, and what was the extent of communist
influence? We knew the rebels were getting help from the Cubans; Che Guevara
himself turned up for a while. But what could we expect from the rebels
themselves?

These questions took on operational significance in 1964, when the
Simbas captured Stanleyville (now Kisangani) and took hostage several
hundred foreigners, including some US officials. The United States and
Belgium responded with a military rescue operation, and Sam became a
one-man task force, impressing everyone with his knowledge and analytic
skill and earning all sorts of kudos. (Most such Agency task forces
have many members, but Sam had more than a bit of the dog in the manger
about him. Hiam interviewed his boss from that time, who said that at
one point a call had come for a hurry-up briefing. Sam was not around
and the boss filled in for him. “Sam,” said the boss, “was mad as hell.
This was his damn country and, by God, he was going to be the one to
talk about it.”[3]

Before long, South African
mercenaries pushed back the Simbas, we took the measure of communist prospects
in the Congo, black Africa got shoved off the front burner by, among other
things, Vietnam, and in 1965, Sam moved over to work on the Asian war. For
starters, he applied his insatiable appetite for information to the issue of
Viet Cong morale, and his first discovery was the huge number of communists who
were deserting. If you combined the desertion rates with after-action body
counts, you wondered how long the other side could put up a credible fight. As
he dug deeper into captured communist documents, however, he came to the
conclusion that the Viet Cong were two or even three times as numerous as our
order-of-battle charts indicated. Measured against those larger numbers,
desertions looked like a manageable problem and the Viet Cong looked like a
much more redoubtable foe.

Here was the start of Sam’s epic
battles with MACV (the US command in Vietnam) and, eventually, with his own
hierarchy in CIA. Actually, a good many analysts in both CIA and the military
agreed that the numbers were far too low, but only Sam kept fighting after
1967, when the issue was defined away in a key national intelligence estimate.

Just a few months after the estimate
was issued, the communists launched their Tet offensive. One might assume the
offensive vindicated Sam’s line of analysis. But although it had an enormous
impact on domestic American attitudes, our approach to the war itself changed
only incrementally, and Sam remained the proverbial prophet without honor.

He was not one to give up, however.
His subsequent actions would have gotten him fired and probably arrested today.
Hiam gives a blow-by-blow account of those battles, starting with Sam’s demand
that CIA essentially find itself guilty of cowardice. He smuggled classified
documents out of the Agency and hid them. Some he buried in the woods near his
farm; others he hid about in various places, including a neighbor’s attic. The
buried trove was almost unreadable by the time Sam dug it up—the paper
worm-eaten and water damaged. Those he could salvage and other hidden copies he
passed to the media and to congressional committees;[4] he provided the material for a “60 Minutes”
program that skewered General William Westmoreland, our next-to-last commander
in Vietnam; and he exhausted himself in Westmoreland’s subsequent defamation
suit against Mike Wallace, CBS, and Sam himself. As Hiam tells the story, Sam
was on the verge of vindication again and again but never quite achieved it,
the last instance being Westmoreland’s withdrawal of his defamation suit
without a verdict when it became clear that he was losing.

By the time Sam died at the age of
55, he had divorced, remarried, and moved to Vermont. He was working on a
memoir but could not bring it to closure. According to Hiam, he suffered from
high blood pressure, arthritis, and gout, and he was eating and drinking too
much. One morning in October 1988, his wife discovered his body in their living
room, a first-aid book open beside him—one last lonely research effort that
didn’t pan out.

Hiam is not a disinterested
outsider. His father was Sam’s roommate at Harvard, and Sam was his godfather.
One wishes he had acknowledged these relationships in the book. That said, Who
the Hell Are We Fighting? still strikes this reader as a clear-sighted
account of the man and his era. Hiam did a huge amount of research. (Sam would
have been proud.) He interviewed people who dealt with Sam throughout his life
(including me) and read everything he could lay his hands on, including Sam’s
buried trove (which is now at Boston University) and the voluminous records
from the Westmoreland defamation suit.

Concerning Sam himself, Hiam provides
revealing contextual information, particularly for the years before Sam arrived
at CIA. When you read about Sam’s privileged, lonely childhood (his parents
were divorced, and his mother kept him at boarding schools and summer camp most
of the year), his later eagerness to share his discoveries comes into better
focus. Similarly, his prodigious childhood research on the American Civil War
prefigured his later work on the Congolese Simbas and the Viet Cong.

Hiam even offers some glimmers of
insight into a question that has always intrigued me: What converted Sam from a
directionless Harvard undergraduate and “downwardly mobile WASP” into a driven
intelligence analyst? The answer seems to have been a case of finally breaking
the family mold. After a stint in the Navy, Sam followed his father’s wishes
and enrolled in Harvard Law School. He decided after two years, however, that
the law was not for him, and Hiam says the decision led the father to “take a
swing at his son.” At about the same time, his girlfriend, a Wellesley graduate
from a well-to-do Alabama family, to whom he had proposed marriage, discovered
she was pregnant. This concatenation of occurrences, I believe, brought him
over the threshold to independence. Sam and his girlfriend quickly married, Sam
quit the New York banking job his father had found for him, and the couple
moved to Washington to begin Sam’s meteoric intelligence career.

* * *

Hiam provides a rich picture of the
Viet Cong numbers debate, the people involved in Sam’s battles, and the
controversies that took up the rest of Sam’s life. He includes too much tedious
play-by-play when he comes to the Westmoreland trial, but his account of Sam’s
earlier struggles is excellent. Reading how Sam badgered his superiors, it is hard
not to come away with a degree of sympathy for them. They clearly had no idea
how to deal with the persistent attacks of this lone, irrepressible idealist.

The turning point in the numbers
story came with the 1967 national estimate that settled on a narrow definition
of the categories to be included in our order-of-battle estimates.[5]
Hiam, citing documents and interviews, makes the following case: MACV,
following implicit or explicit guidance from Westmoreland himself,
would not accept a number that exceeded a certain limit. The
fundamental tenet of US policy was that we were wearing down the
enemy—that at some not-too-distant point, the communists’ attrition
rates would exceed their replenishment capacity. MACV, in fact, was
claiming in 1967 that we might be approaching this “crossover point.”
Sam’s notion that communist numbers should be pegged higher by a factor
of two or three was politically out of bounds by several miles. Hiam,
quoting a member of Westmoreland’s staff who agonized over the issue,
says that at one point Westmoreland’s own intelligence chief came up
with a higher estimate. Westmoreland allegedly reacted by asking, “What
will I tell the president? What will I tell Congress? What will be the
reaction of the press to these higher numbers?” The intelligence chief
was soon sent packing.

There was also a mind-set issue. Military doctrine as it had emerged
from World War II and Korea focused only on regular military
formations. There was no place for the guerrillas and political
infrastructure that were at the heart of the numbers controversy, and
at the heart of Vietnamese communist strategy as well. In his interview
on “60 Minutes,” Westmoreland acknowledged in essence that one of the
reasons he had excluded irregulars from the order of battle was that he
didn’t think they were really soldiers.

MACV, Hiam continues, was adamant
that it have the final say. It was not going to be second-guessed even by the
Pentagon, much less by CIA civilians, and CIA was not willing to press the
point. In late 1967, CIA Director Richard Helms sent a delegation headed by
George Carver, his assistant for Vietnam, to Saigon with orders to resolve the
issue. After days of nasty debates, Carver pretty much accepted MACV’s terms.
According to Hiam, Helms later said “that because of broader considerations we
had to come up with agreed figures, that we had to get this OB question off the
board, and that it didn’t mean a damn what particular figures we agreed to.”[6] Sam (who had been part of the delegation and who had been infuriated
by Carver’s “cave-in”) wrote in his memoir that when his pestering finally got
him an audience with Helms, Helms “asked what I would have him do—take on the
whole military?” Helms added, “You don’t know what it’s like in this town. I
could have told the White House there were a million more Viet Cong out there,
and it wouldn’t have made the slightest difference in our policy.”[7]

* * *

One of the virtues of Hiam’s book
is the snapshots it provides of the others involved, each burdened by his own
priorities and each trying to cope, not just with the Sam Adams phenomenon but
with all the pain and uncertainty of that messy war. Two individuals stand out
in particular. Both agreed fundamentally with Sam; neither backed him during
the struggle over the national estimate in 1967; both testified on his behalf
at the Westmoreland trial.

The first is Colonel Gaines Hawkins,
MACV’s chief order-of-battle specialist. A Mississippi teacher before he
decided to stay in the Army during the Korean War, a reservist conscious of his
inferior standing vis-à-vis West Pointers, Hawkins hit it off immediately with
Sam and fully concurred with Sam’s analysis. He could not, however, bring himself
to go against his sense of military discipline, not to mention risk his career,
by challenging his superiors in 1967. According to Hiam, Hawkins told Mary
McGrory in 1982, when the preliminaries to the Westmoreland trial were getting
under way, that he had rationalized his stance as follows:

[My bosses] are taking over. It is their war to
fight. Maybe [my] higher figures are wrong. Whatever the case, it is
their war and the consequences are theirs. Give them what they want, bless them
and get your ass out of here. [Insertions
and emphasis as in Hiam’s book.][8]

Hawkins later turned down a
promotion to brigadier general rather than accept another assignment dealing
with the Vietnamese communist order of battle. In his interview with McGrory, he
said of his subsequent decision to speak out:

Yes, there is…some private annoyance that life
in relatively quiet retirement…will never be the same again. But, know, too,
Miss Mary, there is a compulsion here, a tardy realization that the tale must
come out no matter what the personal pain or annoyance. In truth, the retelling
is somewhat like the war itself. It hurts, and it is larger than all of us.[9]

The other individual is George
Allen. Allen worked on Vietnam, first for the military and then for CIA, for 30
years, beginning in the 1950s. At the time of the 1967 estimate, he had the
dubious distinction of being Sam’s nominal boss (as he himself put it,
referring with tactful euphemism to Sam’s freelancing, Sam was “working under
my general supervision”[10]) as well as George Carver’s deputy. Like
Hawkins, Allen faced a moral dilemma over the 1967 estimate and yielded. He
considered resigning but decided against it. According to Hiam, he explained
his thinking to CIA historian Harold Ford as follows:

I had four daughters, one of them [a] sophomore
in high school—and three coming up behind—and the only thing I know is
intelligence. I persuaded myself, Well, stay and try to win the next battle. But Sam decided to do what he did. [Emphasis
in Hiam’s text.][11]

One of the defense lawyers in the
Westmoreland suit told Hiam, “George Allen was crossing a lot of Rubicons by
coming and testifying.” (Both Hawkins and Allen had retired by the time of the
Westmoreland trial; thus career considerations no longer inhibited them.)

* * *

Hiam’s book is an excellent study
of this one important episode in the Vietnam saga. For a sense of the role of
intelligence through the whole war, however, one must turn to accounts like
George Allen’s None So Blind and Harold P. Ford’s CIA and the Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes, 1962-1968.[12] To me, it quickly becomes clear that Sam’s
battles were part of a dialogue of the deaf that had begun long before and
continued until the end of the war in 1975—a dialogue in which civilian
policymakers, military commanders, and not a few intelligence professionals
worked from serious misperceptions.

For policymakers, the US involvement in the war had begun as part of our worldwide struggle against communism,
and policymakers never really came to terms with the aspects of the war that
did not fit this preconception. They failed until too late, for example, to
recognize the strength Hanoi gained from its standing as the embodiment of
Vietnamese nationalism, and the powerful force that emerged from the welding of
nationalism with communist discipline. The American can-do attitude, and the
corollary that American ideals were welcome everywhere, led easily to
over-optimism: surely, we could “win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese
and beat this ragtag bunch of communists.

Moreover, we had begun our
commitment in Vietnam in the shadow of the “who-lost-China” controversies of
the 50s and the trauma of the Korean War, and throughout the war the political
costs of defeat in Vietnam remained too high to contemplate. At the same time,
policymakers were acutely aware of the political and economic pressures
limiting the resources they could commit to the war. As the Pentagon Papers show, their time and attention were consumed in endless debates about how to
cope with this array of unsatisfactory choices. They had little time for
intelligence, especially if its message just made the choices harder.

The US military had fallen
into the trap of fighting the last war. For all the lip service to “counterinsurgency,”
military doctrine had enormous difficulty looking beyond the main-force combat
that had gained the generals their stars. Control—of territory and of
population—was more important than the attitudes of ordinary Vietnamese. And
just as their civilian bosses underestimated Hanoi’s political staying power,
the generals underestimated its ability to absorb enormous losses and keep
fighting.

And intelligence? First of
all, we need to keep in mind that intelligence was only a peripheral player in
the policy debates. The focus was on what our
side should do, not the capabilities or intentions of the other side.
As Harold Ford notes, Helms himself had had an object lesson in this
cold reality in 1965, just two years before the Viet Cong numbers
debate. The CIA director then was John McCone, and Helms was head of
the espionage directorate (then called the DDP), just one notch down in
the hierarchy. This was the year President Johnson decided on a
substantial increase in the US ground-force presence in Vietnam. McCone
argued forcefully that only a no-holds-barred US air campaign against
the North would turn the tide. Johnson’s response was to shut McCone
out of the decisionmaking process, and McCone resigned shortly
thereafter.[13] Helms surely carried the scars of that experience two years later.

Viet Cong numbers were far from the
only thing on Helms’s plate, moreover. According to Ford, Helms was
simultaneously pushing a skeptical appraisal of the US bombing campaign through
the system, and he was reluctant to do anything that might make his military
counterparts less willing to go along with it.[14] He also had to keep his eye on the rest of the
world, notably the Middle East: the Six-Day War (in which CIA analysts had
acquitted themselves well) had occurred just a few months earlier.[15]

Second, it seems clear that MACV’s
order-of-battle analysts did tailor their estimates to the needs of their
consumers. According to Hiam, one lieutenant said he was told, “Lie a little,
Mac. Lie a little.” George Allen told Ford that the head of the MACV
order-of-battle unit at the time, a hard-charging careerist who later became
head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, acknowledged years afterward that “of
course” there were many more Viet Cong than MACV’s charts showed, but the
numbers on the charts were “the command position.”[16]

As for CIA, Ford cites numerous
occasions of skepticism among agency analysts about prospects for the war. The
writers of the Pentagon Papers, too, note that CIA’s analysis was often more
realistic than that of others. But, it is one thing to put forth cogent
analysis and another to have an impact on policy. It was not just Helms who was
convinced that taking on MACV would be suicidal. Even one of Sam’s more
sympathetic colleagues told Hiam, “Sam and I had a lot of slinging matches
because he had his standards, some of which I knew damn well wouldn’t sell.”

The problem went deeper than
relative bureaucratic clout. Neither Sam nor anyone else ever managed to make
it clear to their bosses just why the so-called “numbers” debate was so
important. It was much more than a simple matter of numbers: which Viet Cong
groups you thought we should count was a function of what kind of war you
thought we were fighting, and no question could be more fundamental than that.
Not having grasped this point, a senior member of Carver’s mission to Saigon
could assert that particular numbers did not make much difference,[17] and Carver could tell Helms (in a cable from Saigon that Sam
subsequently spirited to his woodland cache), “Major differences lie in realm
of conceptual and presentational methodology rather than in genuine
disagreement over substantive facts.”[18]

Carver’s careful handling of the
issue is particularly revealing. Carver was at least Helms’s equal in bureaucratic
astuteness. He had given the White House a précis of Sam’s findings (without
telling Sam), and, according to Ford, he supported Sam’s analysis at least
through the middle of 1967.[19] The depth of his commitment is suspect,
however. Ford adds that Carver “generally supported the Johnson
administration’s view that things were looking up.”[20] Having fought the good fight in Saigon, he
wound up doing what was necessary “to get this OB question off the board,” as
Helms wished.

Even in the best of circumstances,
intelligence would have faced a monumental task had it challenged the deeply
set preconceptions of the country’s political and military leaders. And in
intelligence matters the circumstances are never the best. Intelligence must
always acknowledge a margin of uncertainty, and the uncertainty will almost
always lead to disagreements that allow policymakers to push their own
preferences. In the Viet Cong numbers case, the willingness, even eagerness, of
MACV’s order-of-battle unit to mesh its estimates with the command’s perceived
political imperatives probably made the task insurmountable.

Of course, our side’s misperception
of what a Leninist would have called the correlation of forces in Vietnam went
well beyond the Viet Cong numbers debate. Hiam, quoting Sam’s memoir, recounts
what Sam’s new boss said on the day in August 1965 Sam arrived to work on
Vietnam. The boss, Edward Hauck, had gone into the Army in 1942 at the age of
18. He was fluent in Japanese and Chinese, and he had been part of an American
unit attached to Mao Zedong’s forces. He became a CIA analyst on Indochina in
1951, well before the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. In a few
sentences Hauck gave Sam a prescient summary of the true correlation of forces:

The war’s going to last so long we’re going to
get sick of it. We’re an impatient people, we Americans, and you wait and see
what happens when our casualties go up, and stay up, for years and years. We’ll
have riots in the streets, like France had in the 1950s. No, we’re not going to
“clean it up.” The Vietnamese Communists will. Eventually, when we tire of the
war, we’ll come home. Then they’ll take Saigon. I give them ten years, maybe
twenty.[21]

Saigon fell, of course, a few
months shy of ten years later. Hauck eventually was transferred from the
Vietnam account to a posting in Tokyo that signaled to all that the next step
would be retirement. What looks in hindsight like realism looked like defeatism
to his superiors.

* * *

One of many ironies in the Sam
Adams story is that the Tet offensive rendered the argument over Viet Cong
numbers irrelevant: in the course of the fighting, the Viet Cong were
eliminated as a military force. Now the key question was not the strength of
the Viet Cong but the staying power of North Vietnam. Our side didn’t do too
well here either. Ed Hauck once told Sam, “Sometimes I think the cables I read
now are from that last war [when the Vietnamese Communists defeated the
French], only somebody’s changed the dates.”[22] Through four administrations before Sam and
afterward, we Americans— civilian and military policymakers and intelligence
analysts—never found a way to change the correlation of forces. Little wonder
that when the redoubtable journalist Orianna Fallaci asked Henry Kissinger in
1972, “Don’t you find, Dr. Kissinger, that it’s been a useless war?”, Kissinger
responded, “On this, I agree.”[23]

What made Sam unique was not just
his refusal to back off but also his unearthing of genuine
information—information that was far from definitive but more solid than most
of what emerged from the murk, information that called into question our basic
approach to the war. Rightly or wrongly, Sam’s superiors decided against
challenging the policy consensus. And the war ended as Ed Hauck had predicted.

For this observer, it is hard to
see that we have improved much in subsequent years. We still have a problem
when strongly held mindsets on the policy side meet an intelligence
establishment that lacks definitive information (as it nearly always does),
can’t achieve agreement internally, doesn’t want to get too far out of line
with its customers, and is conscious of the limited leverage that comes with
its position near the foot of the table.

* * *

What can intelligence do? Drawing
up a list of prescriptions is easy; putting them to work is a challenge. The
following is my own list. I have tried to measure Sam against it.

First, know all you possibly
can. In particular, look beyond what everyone else is reading and
supplement your reading with talking. Sam’s insights came from slogging through
piles of material no one else had looked at. Similarly, I have the strong
impression that detailed expertise, far beyond what we are likely to learn from
official sources, is more critical today than ever before on a whole range of
important topics: the workings of Iran’s theocracy, the place of Islamic
radicalism in both the Muslim world and the West, and political dynamics in the
countries of the former Soviet Union come immediately to mind. Basic area
knowledge is essential but not sufficient. I am convinced that, on many
first-order topics, we cannot gain the knowledge we need without a
time-consuming effort to deal directly with people who are immersed in the area
of interest. This is much more easily said than done, given the mass of
available information and the substantial fragment of that mass which arrives
in an analyst’s electronic inbox every day. Moreover, the culture often seems
to push in the opposite direction: quickness may seem more highly valued than
depth, and moving from one assignment to another more career-enhancing than
sticking to one topic.

Sam’s experience is a case in
point. True, when he was working on Vietnam, the list of things he needed to
know was narrower than it is for most analysts. However, he did exemplary work
in a broader arena when he worked on the Congo, not just tracking reporting
from official US sources but also studying such critical topics as the details
of the country’s tribal makeup. But even on the Congo, he could do this only
because his superiors gave him his head. Freelancing became his standard way of
operating when he moved over to Vietnam, and it is both a significant irony and
a cautionary lesson for those who practice the craft of intelligence that this
was both his chief strength and the main factor in his failure.

Second, understand what the
traffic will bear. This precept, of course, would have outraged Sam, but it
is a fact of analytic life.[24]Intelligence,
a staff function, will rarely be the main topic considered by the line
officials charged with making the decisions. Thoughtful use of the precepts
described here may open the door a little wider, but in the end, as Gaines
Hawkins observed, both duty and temperament will lead policymakers to treat it
as “their war to fight.”

What, then, does an intelligence
analyst do when confronted with something as egregious as the cooking of the
books at MACV? Most analysts will not face such a dilemma, but this is by no
means a unique instance. Every analyst might benefit from posing the following
hypothetical question:

On the one hand, you have Sam, persisting in
his quixotic attack no matter what the consequences; on the other, you have
Hawkins and Allen, choosing discretion over valor. What would you have done in
their shoes?

Finally, get all the help you
can. Back when Sam was an analyst, not much thought had been given to how
the analytic process worked and how it might be improved. Nowadays, the
shortcomings of a solo effort like Sam’s are well documented. Every analyst
starts from a body of analogies and heuristics based on past
experience—elements of earlier events that resonate when we examine a current
problem, practical rules of thumb that have proven useful over time. The power
of this approach is incontestable, but we are all too easily blinded to its
weaknesses.

The evidence is clear: analysis is
likely to improve when we look beyond what is going on in our own heads—when we
encourage others to challenge our analogies and heuristics with their own, and
when we use any of several techniques designed to make explicit the underlying
structure of our analytic argument.

This process will bear little
resemblance to the time-honored ritual of intelligence coordination. It must be
iterative and informal; it must occur before the analysis is locked into
finished prose; and the need for enlightenment must not be sacrificed to the
need for an agreed text. This means exploiting the potential of informal
electronic communication and, perhaps more important, making continual,
comprehensive, collegial dialogue integral to the analytic process.

* * *

Not long before Sam resigned, he showed me a
matrix:

1. Analyst Right; Boss Right

2. Analyst Right; Boss Wrong

3. Analyst Wrong; Boss Right

4. Analyst Wrong; Boss Wrong

The toughest quadrant for the
analyst, he said, was number 2; in his case, the “boss” was, in a real sense,
the president of the United States. Hiam does a superb job of showing what
happens when an idiosyncratic analyst finds himself ensconced in that quadrant.
Sam’s very uniqueness means that Who the Hell Are We Fighting? brings
fundamental questions about the relationship between intelligence and policy
into sharp relief. Not only will it enlighten the general reader; it is worthy
of inclusion as a case study in any curriculum for intelligence analysts.

[5]See SNIE 14.3-67,
Capabilities of the Vietnamese Communists for Fighting in South Vietnam, 13
November 1967. The declassified estimate, along with many other declassified products
can be found in Estimative Products on Vietnam, 1948– 1975 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,
2005) and at www.cia.gov/nic.

[21] Hiam, 42. This
perspective was evident in the following from a Directorate of Intelligence
memorandum published in August 1966: “During their nine year struggle [the
Franco-Viet Minh War], the Communists successfully used military pressure as a
political abrasive. They worked more on French will than on French strategic
capabilities and eventually succeeded in making the struggle a politically
unsaleable commodity in metropolitan France.” See The Directorate of
Intelligence, 1952–2002: Fifty Years of Informing Policy (Washington, DC: Central Intelligence Agency, 2002).

All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis
expressed in this article are those of the author. Nothing in the
article should be construed as asserting or implying US government
endorsement of an article’s factual statements and interpretations.

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Because of safety concerns for the prospective applicant, as well as security and communication issues, the CIA Recruitment Center does not accept resumes, nor can we return phone calls, e-mails or other forms of communication, from US citizens living outside of the US. When you return permanently to the US (not on vacation or leave), please visit the CIA Careers page and apply online for the position of interest.

Solicitations to transfer large sums of money to your bank account: If you receive a solicitation to transfer a large amount of money from an African nation to your bank account in exchange for a payment of millions of dollars, go to the US Secret Service Web site for information about the Nigerian Advance Fee Fraud or "4-1-9" Fraud scheme.

If you have information which you believe might be of interest to the CIA in pursuit of the CIA's foreign intelligence mission, you may use our e-mail form. We will carefully protect all information you provide, including your identity. The CIA, as a foreign intelligence agency, does not engage in US domestic law enforcement.

If you have information relating to Iraq which you believe might be of interest to the US Government, please contact us through the Iraqi Rewards Program —

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Report Threats

The United States and its partners continue to face a
growing number of global threats and challenges. The CIA’s mission
includes collecting and analyzing information about high priority
national security issues such as international terrorism, the
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, cyber attacks,
international organized crime and narcotics trafficking, regional
conflicts, counterintelligence threats, and the effects of environmental
and natural disasters.

These challenges are international in scope and are priorities for
the Central Intelligence Agency. If you have information about these or
other national security challenges, please provide it through our secure
online form. The information you provide will be protected and
confidential. The CIA is particularly interested in information about
imminent or planned terrorist attacks. In cases where an imminent
threat exists, immediately contact your local law enforcement agencies
and provide them with the threat information.